He sat down in the sand, his back against the side of the truck and pulled the brim of his bush hat over his eyes, and gradually, his head nodded forward and he dozed.
In what seemed to be the same moment of time, he came awake to a gentle tug at his shoulder, Marie smiled down at him. ‘We should be making a move, Gavin. It’s after six.’
He got to his feet and looked into the interior of the truck. Ruth Cunningham was curled up in one of the passenger seats, sleeping. He smiled at Marie and climbed behind the wheel. She and Jamal went round to the other side and Kane gently eased in the clutch and drove away.
There was a car compass fitted to the dashboard and he decided to leave the camel tracks and pursue what seemed to be a much more direct route to Shabwa.
Gradually the sun dipped towards the horizon in a great orange ball and then the night fell with its usual rapidity. The sky was clear, with stars strung away to the horizon like diamond chips, and the moon bathed the desert in an unearthly white light.
Marie had dozed off, her head against Kane’s shoulder, and he leaned back in his seat, hands steady on the wheel, and stared ahead into the night.
When he saw it, the shock was so great that he slammed his foot against the brake, bringing the truck to a halt with such force that everyone was thrown forward in their seats and brought violently awake.
‘Gavin, what is it?’ Marie cried in alarm.
He pointed over to the right-hand side of the vehicle without speaking. Standing poised on top of a small rise, throwing a long, dark, moon-shadow across the sand, was a delicate stone pillar.
Kane got out of the truck, followed by Marie, and walked slowly towards it. When he was a few feet away, his foot kicked against something with a metallic clang.
He picked up a couple of cans and weighed them in each hand. ‘Corned beef and soup. Whoever it was, no Arab, that’s for sure.’
He leaned down and picked up another object as Ruth Cunningham and Jamal moved forward to join him. For a moment they could not see what it was, and then he turned and held it out towards them. It was a large and very empty aluminium water-bottle.
TEN
JAMAL GENTLY CLEARED loose sand away from the base of the pillar while Kane knelt beside him, directing the beam of a powerful electric torch on the work.
After a while, the Somali stopped digging and pointed. Kane leaned forward and saw that a long inscription in perfectly chiselled characters had emerged. He studied it carefully for several minutes and then got to his feet and walked back to the truck.
A spirit-stove flared in the slight breeze. Marie and Ruth Cunningham were heating cans of beans in a pan of boiling water. Kane flung himself down beside them, and Ruth poured hot coffee into a tin mug and handed it to him. ‘Have you found anything more?’
Kane drank some of the coffee and nodded. ‘A long Sabean inscription – that was the language of ancient Sheba, by the way. Unfortunately I haven’t any books with me and I’m a little rusty.’ He held out the mug for more coffee. ‘I managed to decipher one or two words.
Asthar, for example, and a reference to distance which I’m not familiar with.’
Marie pushed back her hair with one hand and the light from the spirit-stove, flickering in the wind, danced across her face. ‘You mean it’s probably a sort of milestone?’
Kane nodded. ‘It’s obviously one of the seven pillars mentioned by Alexias.’
‘But is that possible?’ she said. ‘If that pillar was erected during the time of the Queen of Sheba it would be almost three thousand years old.’
He shrugged. ‘That’s perfectly possible in the dry heat of the desert. I’ve seen inscriptions at Marib over two thousand five hundred years old and they look as fresh as if the mason had chiselled them yesterday – and another thing, you know how frequent sand storms are here. It’s probably been buried, then uncovered again, scores of times over the ages.’